As usual, we have much to celebrate... The rabble has been driven
from the public parks. Our adversaries, now defined by the freaks
and criminals among them, have demonstrated only that they have
no idea what they are doing. They have failed to identify a
single achievable goal."

Luckily, he continues, the 99% didn't continue with their plans
to have a run on banks. But that doesn't mean all is said and
done — many 1%ers don't even know who they are (disgusting):

"Disturbingly, his recent polling data reveal that many of us
don’t even know who we are: Fully half of all Upper Ones believe
themselves to belong to the Lower 99. That any human
being can earn more than 344 grand a year without having the
sense to identify which side in a class war he is on suggests
that we should limit membership to actual rich people.
But we wish to address this issue in a later memo. For
now we remain focused on the problem at hand: How to keep their
hands off our money."

Lewis identifies two major threats to the 1%.

"The first is the shifting relationship between ambitious
young people and money...Our Wall Street friends, wounded
and weakened, can no longer pick up the tab for sucking the
idealism out of America’s youth. But if not them, who?
We on the committee are resigned to all elite universities
becoming breeding grounds for insurrection, with the possible
exception of Princeton."

"The second threat is in the unstable mental pictures used by
Lower 99ers to understand their economic lives. (We have
found that they think in pictures.) They appear to have
switched this out of their minds for a new picture, of a life
raft with shrinking provisions. A dollar in our pockets they now
view as a dollar from theirs. Fearing for their lives, the Lower
99 will surely become ever more desperate and troublesome."

Awful. This is a ticking time bomb — a lack of new 1% blood
combining with an increasingly conscious 99%? That can't happen.
(Think about it: "They may even be frightened into momentary
submission. (We’re long pepper spray." But that's just a
band-aid.)

So, what's the real solution?

"Hence our committee’s conclusion: We must be able to quit
American society altogether, and they must know it. For too long
we have simply accepted the idea that we and they are all in
something together, subject to the same laws and rituals and
cares and concerns. This state of social relations between rich
and poor isn’t merely unnatural and unsustainable, but, in its
way, shameful. (Who among us could hold his head high in the
presence of Louis XIV or those Russian czars or, for that matter,
Croesus?) "

For a shining example of how this is done correctly, we turn to
Greece (obviously):

"The modern Greeks offer the example in the world today that is,
the committee has determined, best in class. Ordinary
Greeks seldom harass their rich, for the simple reason that they
have no idea where to find them. To a member of the Greek Lower
99 a Greek Upper One is as good as invisible.

He pays no taxes, lives no place and bears no relationship to his
fellow citizens. As the public expects nothing of him, he always
meets, and sometimes even exceeds, their expectations...

That is the sort of relationship with the Lower 99 we must
cultivate if we are to survive."

There are some Americans that already have this down pat and,
according to Lewis, there's one in particular who deserves an
award for his hard work — Amazon.com
CEO Jeff
Bezos.

His private rocket ship may have exploded before it
reached outer space. But before it did, it sent back to Earth the
message we hope to convey: